With Justice For all?

Reflection: We started our project by studying Dr. King’s ideas of Civil Disobedience and his definitions of what makes a just and unjust law. Then we studied various moral and political philosophies of justice that have influenced our legal system including Deontology, Utilitarianism, John Rawls’, and Libertarianism. From there we started to researched injustices in Durango and heard from multiple community organizations about the issues they were working on from homelessness to immigration to environmental issues. Students researched different issues and then voted on Homelessness to focus on. As a class, we researched homelessness and heard from various community organization who worked on this issue. We heard from Axis, Ed Aber, Food Not Bombs, and Veteran Homestead Project. We also got a chance to go visit test tracks, the camping area for people experiencing homelessness. Once we had done all of our research and felt we had a solid grasp on the issue we defined the problem and the goal for the event. We started planning our event and creating different projects to achieve our goal. Our event was held at the fairgrounds and we had over 100 people show up at our event. To start our event off we had two keynote speakers, Jennifer Turner and Julie Westendorff. They brought two perspectives on the issue of homelessness. After the Keynote speakers, we gave a chance for people to walk around, talk to students about their projects and to different organizations that help people experiencing homelessness. We then pulled everyone together for dinner with a speech by Harley Farkas. When everyone was eating dinner I had the chance to talk to multiple community members. One of the most memorable conversations I had was with a women named Ember. Ember was a women experiencing homelessness that lived up in the camp. She was very positive and super energetic. We connected over our love for the environment and the different things she has learned from her experiences. She told me stories about her living in the redwoods, as well as her, want to take invasive species out of the camp. I really enjoyed talking to her and hope to talk to her again. This project pushed me to get something done in a short amount of time as well as becoming better at adjusting plans when something doesn’t go as planned. Trying to get our whole art piece done on time was difficult. When we began planning our art project we wanted to put our piece on a wall downtown, so we spent most of our time trying to find a place to put it up. When we were unable to find a wall downtown, we had about a week and a half to actually create our piece. Due to not being able to find a place, we decided to put it on two pieces of wood and find a place after the event. In the end, this went really well because we were able to have people at the event contribute to it and look at what others had written. This project really opened my eyes. Before this project, I didn’t really realize that homelessness was a big issue in our community and how our community is being affected by it. Not only that, but this project changed my perception of people experiencing homelessness. Before this project I definitely had this stereotype of people experiencing homelessness were always drunk or had mental health issues, I was afraid to talk to them when I saw them around town. After talking to multiple people experiencing homelessness and hearing their stories, I realized they are not so different from us. They experience different challenges and struggles, but in one way or another they are still human and have commonalities with people who are not experiencing homelessness. People experiencing homelessness are just wanting to be seen as any other person and don’t want to be referred to as homeless. From this project, I will talk to someone and get to know them before I make a judgment and stereotype them.​

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